Two engineers with overlapping AI backgrounds are trading views on whether handing writing duties to LLMs strips away the personal act of crafting words or simply follows the same convenience path that maps apps took years ago.
the whole point of writing is that YOU YOURSELF ARE CREATING THE WORDS YOU IDIOT
Unfortunately, I think that in the near future, not using LLMs to write for you will be like someone refusing to use Google Maps for directions in a new city. A bizarre idiosyncratic choice that's just completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of people.
Yacine argues the entire exercise of writing collapses once the words stop coming directly from the author, treating the refusal to outsource as a deliberate choice rather than a temporary habit.
Nabeel counters that rapid tool improvements and reader indifference to origins will make AI-generated prose the default online, shrinking the share of human-only writing without anyone noticing the switch.
Positive users praise rejecting LLM writing to preserve critical thinking, while negative users lament AI text dominating because it produces inauthentic output and weakens human thought.
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It will be an uncommon choice not to have LLMs write for you, but it won't be a merely idiosyncratic one. It will be what all the people who care about thinking well do.
https://paulgraham.com/writes.html
Unfortunately, I think that in the near future, not using LLMs to write for you will be like someone refusing to use Google Maps for directions in a new city. A bizarre idiosyncratic choice that's just completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of people.
Not using LLMs to write for you won't be like not using Google Maps in a new city. It will be like choosing to run and lift weights, even though we now have machines that can transport us and lift weights for us.
It’s too easy to write with LLMs and most people don’t care very much (either as readers or writers); *and* the LLMs will get better. People take the easy route for most things.
So the conclusion seems inevitable: over time, the majority of the text we read will be AI-written.
Unfortunately, I think that in the near future, not using LLMs to write for you will be like someone refusing to use Google Maps for directions in a new city. A bizarre idiosyncratic choice that's just completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of people.
A few formative books for me (in the order I read them). I wonder what those authors would have done with their lives, in the age of LLMs?
I wonder what fraction of our civilization's peak thinking is being done by people through the medium of writing? I suspect it's high. And how much of that will vanish, versus transmute into other forms (perhaps better forms)?
@yacineMTB That's not the "whole point of writing" in any sense whatosever. One major point of writing is to communicate information across time and geography,.
I wonder what fraction of our civilization's peak thinking is being done by people through the medium of writing? I suspect it's high. And how much of that will vanish, versus transmute into other forms (perhaps better forms)?
Unfortunately, I think that in the near future, not using LLMs to write for you will be like someone refusing to use Google Maps for directions in a new city. A bizarre idiosyncratic choice that's just completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of people.
In fact, since it will be what all the smartest people do, it will probably be prestigious to write for oneself. Which in turn means more people will claim to do it than will actually do it.
i write, i speak, audience of two. myself and my creator
Same. It’s not that I don’t want you to use AI in your interactions with me. Quite the contrary, actually: if I can *tell* you used AI, it means you’re not being enough of a centaur, just a lazy person ordering a horse around.
fwiw despite being generally very positive about AI, I find many of the most common AI "tells" in writing immediately offputting, and make it far less likely that I'll e.g. respond to an unsolicited email. Ofc if you're using AI and people can't tell that's a different story.
@TheStalwart @yacineMTB Probably 99% of all writing is not done by “writers”—it’s just people “communicating info across time and geography” as you put it, but we talk about LLMs on here as if they are only proposed to supplant human writing of fiction or journalism
@TheStalwart @yacineMTB Communicate what? Interpolations in latent space? I may as well “communicate” with a brick wall
@TheStalwart @yacineMTB No, “to communicate information across time and geography” is the point of dissemination. Writing doesn't need to be communicated.
Our brains excel at making connections, thoughts, ideas. They are not so good at remembering them all. That is the point of writing.
@TheStalwart @danielyoung1000 @yacineMTB He’s so fucking goated Joe sometimes I read a Melville sentence and just have to look up at the sky and smile. Owe you eternally for your tweeting about it so much that I finally read him.
@TheStalwart @yacineMTB AI can do a bit of editing maybe but like choice of words, prose, and other stylistic choices belong to an author which should not be AI. Otherwise there's no point, readers can just go ask chatgpt directly. And IDK even an editor might influence overall feeling of publications
@nabeelqu was it you who said human-written text will be like artisanal furniture
@eliesgalvira @yacineMTB I agree, not all writing is about time/space travel. Hence the existence of diaries that people don't re-read
@henrytdowling You should try reading the essay. It begins by saying that very few people will write for themselves.
@TheStalwart @yacineMTB Pretty much the definition of stupidity to use the word "idiot" like this. I sort of understand that the cloak of the internet allows it, but you'd think people would be embarrassed even with that cloak.
@TheStalwart @yacineMTB the emotional response says it all...
@paulg Yeah! I do wonder if there'll be a similar split, with people using AI for their actual work, and then doing their own thinking separately in specially designed training situations
Using a language model to do your homework is like using a forklift to do your weightlifting
